Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin wants to continue his war in Ukraine the same way he secured the freedom of a major Russian arms dealer on Thursday: Causing Western governments so much pain that they eventually make a deal.
The Kremlin pushed for more than a decade to release Viktor Bout, who was convicted in 2011 of conspiracy to kill Americans, from prison in the United States. But it was only this year, with the arrest at a Moscow airport of US basketball star Brittney Griner, that Putin found the power to get his way.
On Thursday, pro-Kremlin votes celebrated Mr Bout’s release, in a prisoner exchange for Ms Griner, as a victory, a sign that the United States, regardless of its desire to punish Russia for the war in Ukraine, will nevertheless come to the table when important American interests are at stake. Russia was negotiating from “a position of strength, comrades,” Maria Butina – a pro-Putin MP who herself served time in a US prison – posted on the Telegram messaging app.
Mr. Putin’s emerging strategy in Ukraine, in the wake of his army’s repeated failures, now increasingly mirrors the strategy that eventually brought Mr. Bout back to Moscow. He is bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, effectively holding the population hostage while trying to break the country’s spirit.
The tactic threatens the European Union with a new wave of refugees, just as Putin uses a well-known economic lever: to stop gas exports. And Putin is betting that even after showing much more unity in support of Ukraine than Putin seems to have expected, the West will eventually tire of the struggle and its economic ill effects.
There is no guarantee that the strategy will work. While President Biden concedes to Mr. Bolt, he has shown no inclination to give in to the United States’ support for Ukraine. While America’s European allies are experiencing some domestic political and economic pressure to push for a compromise with Russia, they have stayed on board.
The release of Brittney Griner
The American basketball player had been detained in Russia since February on drug charges.
In light of this Western solidarity, Putin has repeatedly this week signaled his willingness to keep fighting despite embarrassing territorial withdrawals, Russian casualties the United States estimates at more than 100,000, and the West’s ever-increasing sanctions. On Wednesday, he warned the war “could be a long process”. And at a Kremlin medal ceremony for soldiers on Thursday, Putin insisted — erroneously — that it was the Ukrainian government that committed “genocide,” suggesting Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure would continue.
“When we make the slightest move to react, there’s noise, clamor and screaming all over the universe,” he said, champagne flute in hand, in remarks broadcast on state television. “This will not prevent us from fulfilling our combat missions.”
Mr Putin himself did not comment on the prisoner exchange on Thursday. But in the context of the war in Ukraine, there was a clear undertone to the crowing in Moscow: to supporters, Putin remains a dealmaker and is ready to negotiate Ukraine as long as the West pulls its goal of the country in its path and part to conquer its territory.
“He indicates that he is ready to negotiate,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst who studies Putin. “But he lets the West know that ‘Ukraine is ours’.”
Asked when the war could end, Putin spokesman Dmitri S. Peskov hinted Thursday that Russia is still waiting for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept some kind of deal: “Zelensky knows when this would all end.” can end. It can end tomorrow, if there is a will.
But when one of Putin’s top spies, Sergei Naryshkin, met with CIA head William Burns in Turkey last month, Mr. Burns did not discuss a settlement for the war in Ukraine, US officials said. Instead, Mr. Burns for dire consequences for Moscow if it used nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and discussed the plight of Americans imprisoned in Russia, including Ms. Griner.
“The Russian negotiating style is, they punch you in the face and then they ask if you want to negotiate,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who now works as a research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “The Americans respond to that by saying, ‘You know, you just punched us in the face, you clearly don’t want to negotiate.'”
Nevertheless, negotiations on some issues have continued even as Russia’s missile strikes have escalated.
Russia’s pre-war bloggers were outraged when Putin agreed in September to an earlier high-profile exchange: commanders of the Azov Battalion, a nationalist force within the Ukrainian army that achieved celebrity status for defending a besieged steel mill, for a friend of Mr. Putin, Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk. Some critics have criticized Putin’s agreement to allow Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea as an unjust concession.
And then there were the conversations around Mr. Bolt and Mrs. Griner. On the surface, the exchange seemed like a mismatch, given the stark differences in the severity of their offenses: one of the world’s most prolific gun dealers and an American basketball star who was detained for traveling with hash oil vape cartridges.
But Mr Biden showed he was willing to invest significant political capital to secure Ms Griner’s freedom, while the Kremlin has long sought Mr Bout’s release.
“We know that efforts have been made for years to help Bout,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian Council for International Affairs, a research organization close to the Russian government. “He has also become a symbolic figure” for the Kremlin, he added.
Mr. Bout became infamous among US intelligence officials, earning the nickname “Merchant of Death” for years of evading capture. He was finally arrested during an undercover operation in Bangkok in 2008, with US prosecutors saying he agreed to sell anti-aircraft weapons to informants posing as arms buyers for the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC.
Some analysts believe that Mr Bout has connections to the Russian intelligence services. Such ties have not been publicly confirmed, but they could explain why Mr. Putin – a former KGB officer – worked so hard for Mr. Bout’s release.
“If he was just an arms dealer and cargo tycoon, it’s hard to understand why it would have been such a priority for the Russian state,” said Mark Galeotti, a lecturer on Russia and cross-border crime at University College London. summer.
That means the US decision to release Mr Bout – probably the most prominent Russian in US custody – represented an important compromise. It was reinforced by the fact that the United States accepted the exchange, even though Russia refused to also release Paul Whelan, a former Marine whom the Biden administration also considers a political hostage.
Some analysts believe the decision to release Mr Bout carries risks as it could encourage Mr Putin to take new hostages – showing that his strategy of inflicting pain and then making concessions, continues to bear fruit.
Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist specializing in the security services, said he was concerned about the precedent set by Washington’s agreement to trade an arms dealer for a basketball player who committed a minor offense.
“In the Cold War era, it was always professionals against professionals, one spy against another,” he said. While the United States faces domestic public demand to return a hostage, the Russians can “ignore it completely,” he said.
Now Moscow “can just grab someone with a high public profile in the US — an athlete, a sportsman,” he said. Public outcry in the US “would make that position much more advantageous in terms of these kinds of conversations.”